Backup Backup Backup

As many of you know, we had a “perfect storm” meltdown yesterday which put us offline for about 5 hours in the late-morning and early-afternon: hard drive failure, then complete computer failure. The odds against these things happening successively are staggeringly high, but it shows you that if it CAN happen, eventually it WILL happen. All kinds of other interesting issues arose but Cyberwurx, Phillip Winn and TDavid got us back and almost current.

We thought we were being backed up on a daily basis, but we were working under an ASSUMPTION rather than a verified confirmation. We really lucked out and only lost a few hours worth of posts and comments, but it could have been vastly worse, as at first it appeared that our last backup had been done on Monday, the 7th – this would have been a nightmare.

HERE IS THE LESSON: anything of value on a computer – your home computer, work computer, laptop, servers that host your website, etc etc – must be backed up, ideally independently of the primary computer because hard drives DO go bad, entire computers DO meltdown and go to join their compatriots in hell, ie, shit happens and can happen at any time and if you aren’t backed up, it’s gone. It is YOUR responsibility to make sure this happens – lesson learned.